Acclaimed literary translator Edith Grossman has died aged 87. The American translator is known for her English translations of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes and Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. She died of pancreatic cancer at her home in Manhattan on Monday, the New York Times reported.
Grossman was among the first to insist that her name appear on the covers of the works she translated. In a speech she gave at the 2003 PEN Tribute to Gabriel García Márquez, she spoke about the role of the translator. “Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation,” she said. “No two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term.”
Born Edith Marion Dorph in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to a shoe salesman father and secretary mother, she gained a BA in Spanish language and an MA in Spanish literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Following that, she spent a year in Spain as a Fulbright scholar in 1962 and two years at the University of California, Berkeley, before earning her doctorate in Latin American literature at New York University in 1972. She was married to Norman Grossman from 1965 until their divorce in 1984; the couple had two sons.
Grossman began translating in 1972, alongside teaching positions in New York universities, after a friend, Jo-Anne Engelbert, asked her to translate a story for a collection of short works by the Argentine writer Macedonio Fernández. Over the next decade, Grossman took on more translation work and eventually quit her academic career.
Her 2003 translation of Don Quixote became known as one of the best English-language translations of the Spanish novel, described as “indisputably definitive” by Observer critic Robert McCrum. Grossman’s specialism was Latin American literature, and she was among those who gave English-language readers access to the magical realism genre in the 1980s and 90s. In her Guardian obituary to the One Hundred Years of Solitude author, Grossman explained how an agent called her one day and asked: “Would you be interested in translating García Márquez?”
“I said: ‘Are you kidding me? Of course I would.’ It was for Love in the Time of Cholera and I sent in a 20-page sample. I thought about it long and hard, as you would imagine, because there are as many ways to translate a text as there are translators.”
Grossman was widely respected across the industry – the literary critic Harold Bloom described her as “the Glenn Gould of translators, because she, too, articulates every note.” She also won a number of awards, including the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation in 2006, the Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 2008 and the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation Prize in 2010 for her translation of Antonio Muñoz Molina’s A Manuscript of Ashes. In 2016, she received the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Civil Merit awarded by the King of Spain, Felipe VI.
Translation “permits us to savour the transformation of the foreign into the familiar and for a brief time to live outside our own skins, our own preconceptions and misconceptions,” Grossman wrote in her 2010 book Why Translation Matters. “It expands and deepens our world, our consciousness, in countless, indescribable ways.”
